Terminal Regression

by Mallory Hill

  He didn’t respond. He glared at me for a moment and then dropped back onto his bed. He stared at the floor and took deep breaths.

  “Does it mean nothing to you that I’m in love with you?” he asked quietly.

  I stood my ground. “It means everything. It’s why I have to do this. I can’t allow myself to fall in love with someone who could drop dead at any minute. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m a little bit suicidal. If you die…” I couldn’t even imagine it. Everything I’d done would be a waste. Nothing would have any reason. I’d just go spiraling.

  I was in his arms before I could really start crying. He rocked me back and forth a few times. Then he touched my face and looked at me.

  “Sweetheart, if this doesn’t go well, you die too.”

  I shrugged. “Then it’s over with faster. Either way, it’s the same result.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “I guess so. All right, do me a favor. Think it through. Give it some time. I’ll help you. We’ll think it over, and if we come up with a good, foolproof strategy, we’ll go. If we decide it’s not worth it, we stay. Okay?”

  I could deal with that. I hadn’t planned on going straightaway anyway. Time was good. Strategy was good.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Thank you.”

  He wiped my face. “I know you mean well, Laura. I know you only want to help. I just wish you’d think of yourself. I wish—”

  “You wish I loved me like you love me?”

  He half smiled. “But I love you enough for both of us. Go on to work, baby. I’ll see you tonight.” He kissed me briefly.

  I actually wanted to go to work that day. Work was where this revolution had hatched. Work was where I’d recruit my army.

  Chapter 22

  <<<

  I needed to see Grant, so it was perfect that he called me in that morning. I expected Mimi to be there too, but he was alone.

  “I wanted to thank you,” he said, looking better than he ever had. He seemed healthier maybe, brighter. And I certainly knew why.

  “There’s no need,” I said, ready to get to my thing but trying to be polite.

  “Whatever you said to her, you got through to her. For the first time in almost two years, she looks at me like I’m me. I have my wife back because of you.”

  I shrugged. “I think it was just a matter of time. You guys have something amazing. I have no doubt you’d have found a way back to each other eventually.”

  There were still traces of that energy floating around the office.

  “Maybe. The thing is, Mimi shouldn’t have died. I still took everything from her, and I need to make up for that.”

  “Great,” I said, seizing my opportunity. “So you’re going to help me. I’m developing a plan to bust out of here.”

  He stared at me, no doubt thinking I’d lost it again.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. So you’re going to give me tunnel information. Schedules, surveillance, things like that. Can you do that?”

  He held his hand up. “Let’s go back for a second. You want to go back to Terminal A?”

  “That’s the idea. We need a change. We need to crack that wall and be alive again. I know the farm is good for your health or whatever, but there are plenty of gardens back home. And if we’re really successful, the worlds will unite and you can have the farm while Mimi has her lab.”

  He nodded, humoring me. “Right. And if by chance we’re not successful?”

  “I take the blame, and your life goes on unchanged.” He couldn’t lose. I was handing him the only possible opportunity to get his life back, to give Mimi everything he’d taken from her. How did he not see it?

  “You’d do that?” he asked. “You understand it means putting your life on the line? I’m sure breaking the system comes with some pretty severe consequences. Things have been looking up for you. You’d throw all that away to make a point?”

  I took a breath, determined not to get emotional. “Grant, Will works at the plant. He gets electrocuted every other day to the point where he can’t function on his own. It’s killing him, and he knows it. You once had three months to live. You know what it’s like when you’re about to die but you just have to let it happen. Do you honestly want that to happen to Will? Do you want me to suffer like Mimi did? Grant, we can stop this. We can fix it. No one ever has to go through this again.” I’d held together pretty well, but I was all but pleading with him.

  I watched him consider it. He had to know I was right. Finally, he nodded. “I guess I owe you. I can get you anything you need on the tunnel. But I can’t be involved, and you can’t say a word to Mimi. I can’t put her at risk so soon. You’re sure this is what you want?”

  “I mean, I’m pretty sure. As far as Will knows, I’m still deliberating. But my mind’s made up. I’m not watching him die.”

  He sighed. “Then I can’t stop you. Best of luck. Check in with me from time to time, and I’ll get you your information. But for now, get to work. Tell Mimi I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I breathed a little easier. “You’re a superstar, Grant. Congrats on the wife.”

  I was just buzzing all of a sudden. It was like the farm and all those insignificant workers were a heavy mud I had to trudge through before I could really get to what mattered. But trudge through I did.

  Mimi hugged me. I was a little too hyped to appreciate it fully, but I knew what it must have meant for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, releasing me, the hug having been a little awkward for both of us. “God! I’d forgotten how it feels. I’d forgotten what he does to me.”

  “Yeah, it seemed intense.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. After we left the office, he took me to his place and—”

  “For the love of God, use baseball terms.” I blushed, thinking of my own romantic encounter last night and how Will and I had definitely rounded a base.

  Mimi wasn’t shy. She was small and sweet, but girlfriend knew a thing or two about life and she’d proudly own it. She gave me a sly grin. “I mean, I was going to focus on the beautiful verbal interactions, but I assure you, Grant and Miriam Paxton are old pros at hitting it out of the park.”

  Wow, there it was. And because I had no filter, “So you… I mean, you really… So suddenly you just…”

  She nodded in amusement. “He is my husband… And after we talked like that, it was like two years never happened… Will’s your first, isn’t he?”

  I blushed so hard I feared the blood might actually start gushing out my pores. “What?”

  She sighed. “Your first boyfriend. The first to step up to the plate, in baseball terms?”

  I relaxed a little. “Oh. Yeah, for sure.”

  “And it’s kind of serious?”

  I just felt so flustered thinking about him. On the one hand, we were a new couple, nothing at all like Grant and Mimi. On the other hand, he was in love with me, and I was fighting for his life. It was hard to know what that averaged out to.

  “It shouldn’t be, but I guess it must be.”

  She smiled. “You want to know how you can tell?”

  I nodded eagerly, needing all the help in the world in this department.

  Her smile widened. “Laura Noble.”

  I might have had the world’s most subtle heart attack. I felt it go out for a second, just a little puff of exhaustion in my chest. I stared at her, begging for answers.

  She laughed, apparently finding the biggest issue I’d ever encountered in my life highly amusing.

  “What?” I asked like a child being told a ghost story, like Will on a damaged day. “No. No, no, no, we’re not…What?”

  “It’s the test. Don’t ask me how, but it’s foolproof. When you can imagine taking his name, it doesn’t mean you’ll marry him exactly, but it means he’s a strong candidate.”
r />   I shook my head. “How do you know all that?”

  She grinned. “Chemistry’s kind of my thing, in and out of the lab.”

  Laura Noble. Wow, that gave me chills. God, you date a guy for two days and suddenly he’s prime marriage material? Will was either really good at this boyfriend business, or I’d completely lost my senses. But marriage? Marriage wasn’t on the agenda. Maybe when I was like six the thought had crossed my mind, but that was before life had attacked me and beaten every ounce of hope from my heart. I had no right to assume I’d miraculously get over myself enough to actually make it so far as marriage.

  Grant appeared shortly thereafter, and the sight of the two of them together made me feel all sorts of uncomfortable. I guess they were cute. He pulled her close and kissed her forehead and she made a sort of purring sound, both of them grinning like fools. The whole thing took place within a fraction of a second, but I couldn’t help noticing every little detail. They were so different, so natural.

  “Okay,” he said more to her than to me. “What have we got planned for today?”

  It was just a standard putting stuff in pots day, nothing special. We went out to the supply shed together to gather the necessary materials. I always felt a little guilty going into that shed. I’d never returned the gloves I took for Will and had yet to come clean about what had happened to them. But no one had asked. No one had even noticed, so it must not have mattered.

  Grant had to unlock the door. He usually had everything ready for us before we arrived, but I suppose he did have a reason to be a little distracted this morning. With the lock undone and the keys pocketed, he slid the big wooden door back on its rails.

  We fell silent. All around us, the wind still blew, the sun still shone, the earth spun on without missing a beat. And yet everything was forever changed, tainted by that single moment.

  Like moths to a flame, we were drawn inside by some instinctive curiosity. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t fear or horror as it should have been. The three of us gazed on in shameful apathy, watching it begin to swing, slowly, back and forth like a pendulum, caught in the gentle breeze.

  There was a man strung up by what appeared to be a garden hose. It had been tied to one of the support beams that lined the ceiling; the ladder still stood in place. Then down it went, looping around this stranger’s neck. His head had fallen forward, obstructing his face from view. He wore a dark-blue button-down tucked into his jeans, and his black boots hovered about three feet above the floor.

  I stared at him in awe. Why wasn’t I mortified? Why did I feel so completely indifferent? It was like he was a thing, a ceiling fan, a light fixture, something inanimate that was just there serving its function. It shouldn’t have been like that. For the longest time, I stood in that shed, watching him drift and trying to understand what was happening.

  Grant broke first. He quickly hobbled to one of the shelves, grabbed something, and came back to where Mimi and I were still transfixed.

  “Let’s go,” he said quietly. “Come on, go.”

  I backed away until I felt the earth under my feet. I couldn’t look away. There was something wrong about it, more than the obvious.

  “Laura?” Mimi said gently, bringing me out of my head. “Are you all right?”

  I looked at her. I’d expected to see tears or something, but she was very calm. She wasn’t fazed in the slightest. I nodded.

  Grant relocked the door then hung up the sign he’d grabbed marked “do not enter.” I couldn’t read his face. He went about his business, as he’d no doubt been instructed to at some point or another. Mimi and I followed him back to his office where he closed the door and picked up the phone.

  Even hearing the words didn’t make it seem real. There was a dead man in the shed. But this wasn’t how one reacted to a dead man in the shed. This wasn’t how one reacted to anything. It still felt like an ordinary day.

  Mimi and I sat down as Grant very calmly explained our situation to what must have been his own supervisor. There was a heaviness in the air that made everything muted. I glanced at Mimi only to find her gazing off into the middle distance. She seemed older somehow, like all her bubbles had gone flat. I realized we’d stopped pretending. At some point, each of us had simultaneously dropped our acts. This was as real as I’d ever seen them.

  Grant hung up the phone, but we didn’t do anything more for a while longer. We let the silence settle around us, forming a barricade of sorts before the onslaught of chaos ensued.

  “They’re on their way,” Grant said at last. “Management’s sending a clean-up crew. They’ll take care of everything.”

  I wondered what that meant. Would they bury him, burn him, embalm him and lock him in a drawer for the rest of eternity? It was impossible to say. There was no one to claim him, no one to speak for him.

  “Who was he?” Mimi asked softly, confirming my suspicion that he really was a stranger.

  Grant let out an anxious sigh. “Based on his uniform, I’d say he was a night worker. Must have locked himself in there last night and…” He didn’t go on, but we understood what came next.

  “So he wasn’t a suicide,” I realized. “I mean not before…” My stomach turned. “He did it after the train. This place drove him to it.”

  “Laura,” Mimi scolded sharply.

  “We can’t make assumptions,” Grant backed her up. “We didn’t know him. He could have had any number of reasons.”

  I shook my head. I was right. I felt it. That was what was so wrong about this. He’d killed himself because he was already dead. He had no family, no friends, nothing to love; nothing to do but work and work and eventually come to wonder what it was all for. Terminal B had killed him.

  I felt for him now. My insides worked up a boil, and soon enough my tears began to spill over. He might have had a chance. If he’d just stayed in Terminal A, none of this would have happened. But how could I be surprised? I knew this place killed. I saw it happening every time I brought Will home and every morning as I held my breath waiting to see if he’d wake up. The train really was death; it was just a little delayed. Will, me, Grant, Mimi, Seth, my dad. We were already dead. We just didn’t know it yet.

  Mr. and Mrs. Suicide Support rushed to my rescue with an abundance of cooing and cuddling. I didn’t want their pity; I wanted to be angry. I needed this to fuel my fires and get me into the tunnel. Now more than ever, I had to get back. I lived in a world that made people kill themselves. Maybe I always had.

  The clean-up crew arrived and knocked on Grant’s door. He left us after instructing Mimi to take care of me. She’d come to kneel near my chair and looked up at me when he was gone.

  “Fix this,” she urged suddenly. “I know you want to, and I know you have a plan.”

  I stared at her, not really comprehending. “I’m sorry?”

  “We have to get out of here. This can’t keep happening. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Still just as clueless, I fumbled through a response. “What are you talking about?”

  “So he didn’t tell you? No, of course not. How could he?” She shook her head, mumbling more to herself than for my benefit.

  “Would you mind explaining what exactly is going on?” I asked, my mind jumping all over the place and landing at some pretty scary, speculative conclusions.

  “You know you’re not the first girl I’ve mentored…but you’re the first to last this long.” She watched me warily, her face like stone.

  Though my eyes were so wide I feared they’d pop out of my head, I felt them expand even more as the realization set in.

  “Oh my God.”

  They were dead. Mimi’s other girls had killed themselves, maybe strung themselves up like the man in the shed. No wonder she was so calm when she’d seen his body. This was a regular experience for her, for everyone on the farm, maybe for everyone in Terminal B.

&n
bsp; “We can’t go on like this,” she said. “We have lives now, Laura. I have Grant back. You’ve got Will. We don’t belong here anymore. Terminal B is for the hopeless, but the only way either of us will make it out of this alive is if we have room to hope. I know it’s not up to you to solve everyone’s problems, but if you have a way, if what you said was true and you really think we can get back somehow, don’t give up on it. Please, Laura, you don’t know what’s at stake for me.”

  I had no idea what was at stake for her. Her husband was healthy, her marriage was stabilizing, things were going well for the Paxton clan. But she wouldn’t lie to me, not at a time like this. And, of course, I had motives of my own.

  Still trying to wrap my head around everything, I nodded. “I’m working on it. I asked Grant for train schedules. He said he’ll help me.”

  For maybe the first time, the most tragic yet wonderful joy lit up her face. “He did? So he wants to go back?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Does that mean something?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s just… We’re finally on the same page. After all this time, we’re… But if we don’t get out of here…” I reasoned some aspect of their happiness was staked on the success of my impulsive escape strategy. That really piled on the pressure, but I was somehow undeterred.

  “I will try, Mimi,” I promised. “I can’t guarantee anything will happen. I still don’t know what exactly I’m going to do, but—”

  “You’ll do your best, I know. I believe in you.”

  That was a little dumbfounding. She shouldn’t have had any amount of faith in me. Time and time again, I’d proven just how untrustworthy I was. I’d never done anything right in my whole life. It was a wonder I was still trying, but her trust was completely unfounded.

  “Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  She smiled and took my hand, giving it a little encouraging squeeze. “I have no idea. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could trust people again? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get out of our own heads for a second and live like we were meant to?”

  I doubted that was possible, but who was I to dash her dreams? I’d do what I could; that was all I could say.